Corinne Colarusso calls the works in her “Shaggy Land” exhibition at Sandler Hudson Gallery “ecstatic paintings.” Ostensibly representations of swamps and marshlands, they may actually represent no less than the revivification of a genre of visionary landscape painting generally considered to have died outwith David Jones, Winifred Nicholson and the last of the post-World War British Romantics.

Revivals of it have usually been tinged with a distancing irony, as if to say “We don’t really mean this.” What Colarusso means, though, isn’t anything like an innocent Romanticism. Creating these paintings of imaginary vistas and tangles of reeds and ﬂowers, which depict what she terms “not a comfortable nature, but a fugitive one,” she asked herself such discomfitingly honest questions as “Can artist paint a sunrise in 2011?”(Above: “Shaggy Land.”)

The answer, clearly, is yes, and these paintings demonstrate anew what paint can do that photography and video cannot. These are landscapes that could exist only in vigorously layered paint on canvas; if they were created as manipulated photographs or from-scratch texture-less digital facsimiles, they would almost certainly collapse into sentiment.Executed in the full range of non-literal representation that paint affords, they become vehicles for psychological exploration of our own emotional depths. In fact, these paintings have caused a considerable emotional rush in viewers not ordinarily inclined to disappear into a landscape. There are huge realms of neurological research and speculation about human biology that may be at play here. What are certain are the formalist depths at work. Foregrounds defeat our expectations in their combination of different painting styles. Midgrounds dissolve into backgrounds in ways that keep the eye busy. Light is rendered in ways that seem right to recollection without replicating any night, dawn, dusk, or midday that a camera has captured. The titles alone would suggest this: ”Radiant Night,” “Strings, Charms and Droplets,” “Flowers That Speak, Sunrise,” “Shadows and Moons,” or “Dark Engine,” to cite only a few.

“Dark Engine” (above) is worth singling out for its particular combination of foreground ﬂowers rendered with dramatic contrasts in brushwork (not to mention botanical exactitude) and adjacent implicit reﬂections in water that combine elements of action painting with juxtapositions of color that are more restrained but still energetic. The artist, who describes her project as “the re-enchantment of painting,” said this about “Dark Engine:” “The night is a dark engine. The mind is a dark engine. When you combine them it can create the loop that leads to a dark interior space.” It does. Why it does so, and why it will inevitably not do so for every type and condition ofviewer no matter how deftly the paint is handled, is a topic to be talked about elsewhere. But Colarusso has given us the materials to start the conversation. (Through April 9).